The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The moving story of a vanished island community. Tom Steel
was 63 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with 67 degrees Fahrenheit in the capital city. On many days, however, the weather was too hot for comfort, and because the island offers little shelter the St Kildans worked stripped to the waist. In the spring and summer months it was occasionally very humid. George Murray, the schoolmaster, claimed that the atmosphere was often so heavy on the island that it was difficult to keep awake, and Mathieson and Cockburn also found summer days far from invigorating.
But the St Kildans rarely left their sea-girt home and had little idea what it was like to live elsewhere. Only the occasional visitor gave them an insight into the affairs of the outside world. Not only did the islanders know nothing of what the weather was like in other parts of the United Kingdom, throughout most of their history they were blissfully unaware of the troubles of the people who lived there. Only on a few occasions did the affairs of the nation beyond involve them.
St Kilda’s reputation as the most isolated spot in the United Kingdom was quick to become widespread. As such it was suggested many times that the owner of the island, MacLeod of MacLeod, should offer the place up as a prison. For one woman the proposal became a reality. In the early eighteenth century Rachel Erskine Grange was virtually held captive on Hirta.
Lady Grange, as she came to be styled, was a bad-tempered woman totally opposed to the politics of her husband James Erskine of Grange, the Lord Justice Clerk, who was the brother of the Earl of Mar, leader of the 1715 Jacobite Rising. One night in 1731, when Jacobite sympathizers met at Lord Grange’s house in Edinburgh, Rachel listened in to their conspiratorial talk from beneath a sofa. After a time she could take no more, revealed herself and threatened to denounce her husband and his friends.
The assembled nobles realized that they would have to get rid of her. MacLeod of Dunvegan and MacDonald of Sleat agreed to secrete her in the remote parts of their island possessions, and that night she was quietly removed from the city, bound for the Isle of Skye. News of her death was spread in Edinburgh and a mock funeral at Greyfriars Church was arranged. Her relatives attended, wept, and tried to accept that she was no more.
MacDonald looked after Lady Grange for two years on the lonely island of Heisker, off North Uist. MacLeod of Dunvegan then took responsibility for her and had her deported to St Kilda. There she remained a virtual prisoner for eight years, from 1734 until 1742. On the island it is said that she ‘devoted her whole time to weeping and wrapping up letters round pieces of cork, bound with yarn, to try if any favourable wave would waft them to some Christian, to inform some humane person where she resided, in expectation of carrying tidings to her friends at Edinburgh’. The St Kildans were very hospitable, and put one of their houses at her disposal. She habitually slept during the day and got up at night throughout her period of exile, such was her dislike of the natives. The St Kildans, however, bore no malice and waited upon her royally. She was given the best turf on the island for her fire, and although food was scarce she never went without.
When it was thought that the danger had lessened, she was brought back to Uist, then to Assynt, and then to Skye where she was taught how to spin. She worked alongside the local women who regularly sent their yarn to Inverness, and on one occasion she managed to hide a letter in the yarn sent to market.
Months later the letter reached her cousin, the Lord Advocate. He was appalled by her harrowing account of her adventures and persuaded the government to send a warship to search the coast of Skye for her. But the men of the British Navy could find no trace of her, and MacDonald had her swiftly sent to Uist and then on to the Vaternish peninsula, where she died in 1745.
To this day, Lady Grange is the only woman in Scotland to have had three funerals. The conspirators were still afraid that their evil deed would be discovered, so they filled a coffin with turf and staged a second funeral in the little churchyard of Duirinish, while her body was secretly buried at Trumpan, above Ardmore Bay, on the Isle of Skye. Lady Grange stayed longer on Hirta than any outsider before or since, save the occasional minister sent by the Free Church of Scotland.
After the defeat of his army at Culloden, Charles Stuart and a number of prominent rebels were thought to have escaped to St Kilda. On 10 June 1746, General Campbell of Mamore’s intelligence services reported the rumour to him, and a grand expedition was swiftly mounted to go to St Kilda.
In the afternoon of 19 June soldiers and levies were ferried ashore at Hirta. The islanders had noticed the ships approaching several hours before and had taken to hiding-places in the hills. Forever in dread of being robbed and attacked by pirates, they had centuries before carved out small caves in the scree slope to the west of the village. Totally invisible to the naked eye from village level, the caves provided perfect cover. After searching the village the soldiers finally came across a group of men. The St Kildans had no idea what the soldiers were talking about. The islanders did not know of the existence of a Young Pretender, let alone of King George himself.
The people were to remain totally ignorant of the defeats and victories of a country fighting for an empire until the First World War broke out. In 1799 they had not heard of General Howe’s illustrious crushing of the army of George Washington, and in 1815 knew nothing of Napoleon’s Hundred Days that ended at Waterloo. When George Atkinson of Newcastle-upon-Tyne visited the island in 1831, the first question he was asked was ‘Is there any war?’ It was traditionally the first question asked of any stranger, not that the St Kildans had any idea of what fighting was like. They took part in no war and never lost any of their number in battle. In a description of the islands for the period 1577 to 1595 in which each parish of MacLeod of MacLeod’s empire was allocated the number of men it was expected to put into the field of battle, St Kilda was said not to supply any men because it was inhabited by poor folk who lived too far away. The same attitude of mind found expression in more modern times. St Kilda remains one of the few communities in the British Isles that has no war memorial. ‘Safe in its own whirlwinds and cradled in its own tempests, it heeds not the storms which shake the foundations of Europe,’ wrote Dr MacCulloch in 1819, ‘and acknowledging the dominion of MacLeod and King George, is satisfied without enquiring whether George is the First or the Fourth of his name.’
In 1836 when the island was cut off from the mainland for nearly two years, the minister found, when a passing ship dropped anchor in the bay, that he and his congregation had been praying for King William months after his death. The minister changed his prayers to ‘His Majesty’. It was not until the spring of 1838, by which time Queen Victoria had been on the throne for nearly a year, that to his embarrassment he finally got wind of the sex of his new monarch.
Few on the mainland were prepared to take on any responsibility towards the people of so isolated an outpost. When James IV of Scotland passed an Act stating that islands were in future to be under his rule, he excluded St Kilda because it was so remote that he could not guarantee the people living there his protection. In more modern times, the existence of a community on the island was completely unknown to the Poor Law Commissioners. It was not until 1851 that the first official census was taken on St Kilda – fifty years after the first had been carried out on the mainland. The St Kildans never paid income tax because the Inland Revenue did not bother to send them forms to fill in, and they never paid rates. They never cast a vote in either a local or a general election. No aspiring politician ever sought to solicit their support, although a few Members of Parliament used St Kilda as an example when they wished to complain about the treatment of impoverished areas of Scotland by the government. The islanders never needed to call a policeman. No crime has been recorded in four hundred years of their history. ‘If this island’, wrote MacCulloch, ‘is not the Eutopia so long sought, where will it be found? Where is the land which has neither arms, money, law, physic, politics, nor taxes? That land is St Kilda…Neither Times nor Courier disturbs its judgments…No tax-gatherer’s bill threatens on a church-door, the game laws reach not gannets…Well may the pampered native of the happy Hirta refuse to change his situation.’
A few departments of state showed an occasional interest in the people of St Kilda. The Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages periodically checked the books, and the Receiver of Wrecks at Stornoway on the isle of Lewis claimed half the flotsam and jetsam that drifted ashore on St Kilda, if ever the islanders saw fit to tell him about it. Reports on the physical and economic situation of the islanders were made to the Scottish Home and Health Department